Audio

Transcript

Introduction and childhood

[00:08] Bob Summerwill: So hello, how are you? Who are you?

[00:12] Kieren James-Lubin: I'm Kieren. Kieren James-Lubin. I'm our CEO here at BlockApps and STRATO. BlockApps the lab co, STRATO the protocol.

[00:24] Bob Summerwill: Excellent. And have you always been a sort of a technology person? What were you into when you were growing up?

[00:34] Kieren James-Lubin: Kind of. It was like sporty kid, but also in the math, in the computers. Some people really grew up with computers. I was kind of one of them. Definitely started to code a bit in middle school. Played a bit of video games.

[00:52] Bob Summerwill: Not super geek then.

[00:54] Kieren James-Lubin: Not like a 10 out of 10, like a seven maybe. I went to like science, tech, math high school. You had to take a test to get into. But I guess in part it was academic, but also like the competition was motivating perhaps. So some of both.

[01:22] Bob Summerwill: And what's your sports background there?

[01:26] Kieren James-Lubin: I was kind of more a baseball guy. I played football starting in high school and actually played in college too. So ended up a football guy, but it was sort of baseball first. I did a little gymnastics. I think after puberty it didn't really work anymore and I ended up — they're kind of short, compact guys. And I was also not that into it. It was a challenging sport. Little bit of basketball, was never a great basketball player. But mix it up. I'm today a master sprinter, right. So I'll compete sometimes, schedule permitting.

[02:10] Bob Summerwill: Is that a term?

[02:13] Kieren James-Lubin: If you're like anytime after university, that's not like a professional setting, you could call it masters. Usually like 30 or 35 plus. And most of the people who compete there are pretty good. Like they were quite good when they were young. And I assume I would have been okay, but not great. But there are some hobbyists who kind of pick the sport up later. So.

[02:40] Bob Summerwill: So do you get to meets and things?

[02:42] Kieren James-Lubin: I do, yeah. Well, like last year I went to the US Indoor Nationals. I was kind of close in Florida and so that was a good one. But yeah, the problem with the meets is they take a long time. Like you're a couple hours, sometimes like an hour drive or what have you. And you're like one race, two races, a few seconds. Sometimes you'd feel like it'd be better to train instead.

[03:08] Bob Summerwill: But is that sort of 100, 200 meter?

[03:11] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah, I'm the best at the 60. I'll do up to the 100. For indoors I'll do up to the 400 and I'm not good at the 400.

[03:19] Bob Summerwill: Right, yeah, yeah. I mean how many seconds is a 60 meter?

[03:26] Kieren James-Lubin: 60 — the fastest ever is maybe — well the fastest ever probably happened in a 100 meter race. It's like 6.28 or something like that, 6.30. But the world record is I think 6.34 in an official indoor 60 meter. Yeah.

[03:44] Bob Summerwill: So very short amount of time, very explosive. Yes, no doubt your start is utterly critical.

[03:53] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah, yeah. I'm an okay starter. I'm definitely sort of common with the football guy body type and so on to be a better starter than top end or speed endurance. So right, yeah, you get out pretty good and then sometimes the real track guys run away after.

Princeton, Berkeley, and mathematics

[04:15] Bob Summerwill: So when you went to college, what were you doing there?

[04:21] Kieren James-Lubin: I was a math major. I went to Princeton. I did actually play football for Princeton. In combination was slightly too much. Football is like officially 20 hours a week in season but that was like actual scheduled time, didn't count the walking there, showering, walking back. If you're injured, going to the training room. And so it was like most of a job.

[04:49] Bob Summerwill: Quite a commitment.

[04:50] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah. And then math on top of it was quite a lot. But good experience. It was in those days Princeton was a bit of a pressure cooker. Unlike the policy — most all grades from, let's say I don't know, 1970 on started to rise from a national average of like a C to like a national average of like an A minus or something. And I think this happened in Princeton, but then they explicitly reversed it. So they capped the number of A's that they could give out. So made the classes very competitive.

[05:23] Bob Summerwill: Right. They were doing the bell curve.

[05:26] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah. So it was good times. But definitely you had heard that you got the gentleman's A minus. It was not like that in that era. It was pretty hard.

[05:44] Bob Summerwill: And you were still there when you started on Ethereum, right?

[05:48] Kieren James-Lubin: No, no, no. I started in grad school on math at UC Berkeley a couple years after. I spent a year working for a professor I had. He's in the biophysics. He's a good guy.

[06:01] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[06:02] Kieren James-Lubin: And then applied to grad school that year and went to Berkeley after. And then it was a few years in the math department at UC Berkeley before — so actually yeah, I just passed my qualifying exam. Call it April 2015. I was a little bit in conversation with my dad on Ethereum before that, but I sort of in that process decided to work on Ethereum for the summer. And it was a few months into being a project at that point.

Discovering Ethereum and understanding Bitcoin

[06:34] Bob Summerwill: Yep. So yeah, 2014 there. So what do you think when you first saw Ethereum?

[06:44] Kieren James-Lubin: I read the white paper. I kind of — it was heavy on the phrase smart contracts which a lot of that happened. They're mostly complex financial arrangements now. It didn't turn just yet into the thing we maybe imagined that all of our agreements would be mediated by for the whole world. By this complex but interlinking set of contracts. Like I've heard people describe, if you think about what a company is really, it's actually just a set of contracts. There's employment agreements and you can imagine running the — and a lot of that part.

[07:38] Bob Summerwill: The government, the board and decisions and votes.

[07:41] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so it was like, then I was asking, okay, like most contracts you can get out of but smart contracts are supposed to be immutable. I was like what is the — how do you avoid one? And they ended up introducing a suicide opcode in Ethereum because of this. Of course it's still in the history anyway, but it is probably a good thing that if you didn't want someone to use one anymore that you can kind of blow it up on a go-forward basis and no more funds will come in.

But yeah, after I read it — so I had a bit of Bitcoin before maybe from even 2010. I remember it being $3. It's like should have bought more. And so, but I didn't really understand what Bitcoin was at that time and why other sort of digital money attempts had failed basically. And so I went back after reading the Ethereum white paper and read the Bitcoin white paper and then kind of all the supporting hashcash and all of those materials.

[08:50] Bob Summerwill: You weren't sort of a pre-existing Austrian economic —

[08:54] Kieren James-Lubin: Well, Austrian economic kind of. I don't know if you're just like one is born this way. I grew up in pretty blue New York which is also like a very established business. But so I would say Austrian economic kind of before crypto.

[09:18] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[09:18] Kieren James-Lubin: But I didn't really connect them that hard until later I suppose. It's like —

[09:27] Bob Summerwill: There's some magic internet money thing.

[09:29] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah, I didn't —

[09:31] Bob Summerwill: That some guy made who we don't know who it is.

[09:35] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah, I guess I didn't — it took — didn't appreciate the mechanism until actually read the Ethereum white paper. Then I had to go back and understand because there's a sense in which Bitcoin sort of like shouldn't be possible.

[09:50] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[09:51] Kieren James-Lubin: And yet it is. If you asked a group of smart people, I think they might conclude that no, yes, you need a central counterparty. And I think Greg Maxwell said something like that on the Internet at some point.

[10:08] Bob Summerwill: His original involvement was saying this thing is stupid. I'm going to prove it's not possible.

[10:12] Kieren James-Lubin: It's not possible. Yeah. And it's just still here. I met Greg once, I think with a couple other of the core devs and a guy who actually worked for our company for a while, Lior, at like a restaurant in Berkeley. Maybe 2014. Could have been. Yeah, something at that time.

Bitcoin and Ethereum culture, and the Craig Wright lawsuits

[10:40] Bob Summerwill: I thought you were going to say Crypto Economicon or the O'Reilly.

[10:43] Kieren James-Lubin: It was a little bit after, I think. Yeah. But yeah, smart dudes, super smart dudes, Bitcoin people. It's funny, like in some ways the feeling you get is that they're the smartest people around, but they just never want to change anything.

[11:01] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[11:02] Kieren James-Lubin: And the Ethereum people have more of an engineering mindset and so stuff gets done, it changes.

[11:13] Bob Summerwill: Yeah.

[11:14] Kieren James-Lubin: For better, for worse.

[11:15] Bob Summerwill: Motion kind of useful in a moving world.

[11:20] Kieren James-Lubin: But yeah, it was interesting. I guess like I think Greg just got out of everything, right. Whereas you still see Adam Back around.

[11:31] Bob Summerwill: But yeah, well, I think at least part of that for Greg was Craig Wright and his legal stuff against a bunch of named Bitcoin —

[11:44] Kieren James-Lubin: I didn't even realize they got dragged —

[11:46] Bob Summerwill: Through the courts for many years. So a reasonable number of them just kind of opted out at that point.

[11:55] Kieren James-Lubin: It's like, sorry, was he suing them for what? Okay, I'm very, very loosely aware of the story, but so it's always in court.

[12:08] Bob Summerwill: My understanding is the essence of those cases were somehow — claiming that despite an MIT X11 license on the source code that he was actually the IP owner. Owner of like Bitcoin the name, Bitcoin the database, Bitcoin the file format.

[12:36] Kieren James-Lubin: I see.

[12:38] Bob Summerwill: And that all of these people were in breach of and had taken over his creation.

[12:44] Kieren James-Lubin: Okay. And so he sued the contributors too.

[12:49] Bob Summerwill: So a good number of those core devs were — he was saying they had fiduciary duty. And one of the specific court cases was saying he had a large amount of Bitcoin which was stolen from him and they had a fiduciary duty to change the chain to return his funds to him. So yeah, you kind of get dragged.

[13:21] Kieren James-Lubin: If I say something bad, will he sue me?

[13:24] Bob Summerwill: Not anymore. Not anymore. Because he, at least in the UK, has been told he is not allowed to call himself Satoshi. Though it's still with the Crown Prosecution Service of whether they actually take criminal action against him for perjury.

[13:48] Kieren James-Lubin: I see. Yeah.

[13:49] Bob Summerwill: For his many false statements.

[13:51] Kieren James-Lubin: It is odd. Is he — I thought, is he British? Is he Australian? Australian, yeah. Why is this in —

[14:03] Bob Summerwill: Partially because nChain were formed in the UK, that was where he was working. But a good number of those which were to do with libel — as in a number of these court cases were suing people who'd called him a fraud. And in the UK, the burden of proof is the other way around than in the US, right. You don't have a right to free speech, basically. So traditionally in the UK it's someone says Craig Wright is a fraud. The burden of proof is on the person who has been taken to court. So as in he —

[14:54] Kieren James-Lubin: How did he get them into a UK court? Like, okay, say I call Craig Wright a fraud.

[15:00] Bob Summerwill: Yeah.

[15:01] Kieren James-Lubin: Can he drag me to the UK? Probably not. Right? He can try. He can try. Yeah.

[15:08] Bob Summerwill: But yeah, some of those — well, so Peter McCormack, British podcaster. So he was one of them. But yeah, it was a whole mixture of different court cases. But ultimately they're just proving some of this stuff is just millions of dollars of legal time and effort. So yeah, ultimately all of these many things got rolled together into a thing called the COPA lawsuit, which was basically a consortium of different major crypto companies who did a defensive patent thing and then decided basically they were going to fund the one court case to rule them all.

[16:06] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah.

[16:06] Bob Summerwill: Of fighting back against this with all of the pressure and efforts and funding to have this monster court case which finally ended up with it being declared he is not Satoshi. All of these claims are untrue. You must remove all claims. You cannot say this. You cannot bring further court cases. And then so that was concluded. But he fled at that point. So he's in Asia somewhere unclaimed, living in a cupboard.

[16:44] Kieren James-Lubin: So healthy digression.

Meeting Jim Hormuzdiar and early BlockApps

[16:48] Bob Summerwill: But yeah, so and then you started BlockApps pretty quickly there.

[16:55] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah, I mean we started — I started writing code in early 2015. So this was to your point, after — so I started, I worked basically on Ethereum 2014 summer and then, but more informally. At some point I had an Ethereum email and it was then taken away. And I went back for grad school. Call it September 2014.

[17:32] Bob Summerwill: That's when Jim had started. His was September 14th, I think.

[17:37] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah. Okay. So I must have gotten back a little earlier than that because our friend and advisor, I guess you could say former advisor Steve, had put us in touch and then we met up in person. Jim drove up to Berkeley from Hayward around that time and I think he probably started coding after we met. And yes, that semester sort of like we started building, but more Jim than me and I was still kind of — took some computer science classes. I had one or two in undergrad and learned to code enough as a kid that it was in there.

And yeah, so I believe Vitalik had maybe already won a Thiel Fellowship.

[18:40] Bob Summerwill: Yeah, yeah, I think that was mid-2014. Yeah.

Bay Area meetups, O'Reilly, and Crypto Economicon

[18:43] Kieren James-Lubin: And yeah, I don't — maybe he traveled on the money a little bit, but he mostly used it as just a place to crash when he needed to be in the Bay Area. Sometimes we would — I remember Jim would pick us both up I guess and we would sometimes go down to Mountain View for a meetup or the other way or there. But yeah, there was a lot going on at that time. You threw a stone, you hit a Bitcoin or then Ethereum meetup in San Francisco.

And I don't even really know how the idea came up, but at some point we were in the Bay together and Vitalik — okay, I think I remember. So Steve introduced me to someone who was then at — kind of like the head, for a wrong title but like VP of content at O'Reilly Media. He plans out what the conference show would be. I think he also would approve which books would get written and so on and so forth. A guy named Ben Lorica. So I went and met with Ben and he was into doing a conference and watching what was going on in the space some. And he had more — my co-host was more the Bitcoin guy and I ended up being the Ethereum guy because I could get a hold of Vitalik and him being one of the main events during the conference.

So then I must have contacted him right after. And I think Vitalik suggested we just make a week out of it, basically. So we did. And the scheduling was for late January and we had two conferences sort of back to back. There's the Crypto Economicon, which was hardcore protocol stuff. Ethereum hadn't come out yet, obviously. So this is January we're talking about.

[21:00] Bob Summerwill: January 2015.

[21:01] Kieren James-Lubin: 2015, yeah. And Gavin Wood showed up. We had Peter Todd. I believe we listed Peter Todd as core dev Bitcoin. And we got a message from Bitcoin — still had the foundation at that time. Like, sorry, we do not agree that Peter Todd is a core dev. At best we would call him a core contributor. It's like he writes code. All right, fair enough.

[21:33] Bob Summerwill: The foundation says.

[21:35] Kieren James-Lubin: The foundation says. And yeah, just a bunch — some of the Ripple guys showed up, I think CTO at the time and so on. It was like Jae Kwon, Cosmos, previously Tendermint. Ethan Buchman.

[21:59] Bob Summerwill: Vlad.

[22:00] Kieren James-Lubin: Vlad was there.

[22:04] Bob Summerwill: Andreas Antonopoulos I saw as well.

[22:06] Kieren James-Lubin: He came to the O'Reilly. I don't think he came to the other. Yeah. And he's also just been real quiet for some time. But in any case, it was a good conference and we came out with the feeling that, okay, there's something here. We got a bunch of very smart crazy nerds. But also the suits are interested too. The O'Reilly conference was maybe half suit. And it's a powerful combination feeling of sort of beginning of the Internet sort of thing. Even though Bitcoin had been around by five years plus at that point. But man, this has been a long time.

But yes, it was a good one. And yeah, on the back of that, we started — so I started spending more time writing software with Jim. The client first. He just kind of made it to understand what was going on. But it ended up more than 10 years later, it's the core of our product today.

Client diversity and fork governance

[23:08] Bob Summerwill: Set more than 30,000 commits.

[23:10] Kieren James-Lubin: It's a lot of commits, right? It's doing more stuff. It's quite a bit bigger than Geth, I believe. We have lots of indexing and this and that. It's a net new Solidity interpreter and et cetera. But yeah, it's been developed forever. I mean, there's a million Ethereum clients now. I guess sort of —

[23:35] Bob Summerwill: Well, you've got both execution clients and consensus clients, right?

[23:39] Kieren James-Lubin: Yes, the two sides and like five or more of each.

[23:42] Bob Summerwill: I think it's four and five primary ones. You've got some smaller. But yeah, you have the matrix of those two dimensions, right. Because you can combine any of these. So it's quite a test grid there.

[24:01] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah. It was a good thing, this policy that you wanted client diversity, although it just made it way harder to deliver. Like famously I guess the BitcoinJ — Jeff Garzik. Right. There was like the Bitcoin people did not want another Bitcoin client because you could get a fork. And the Ethereum people went way the other way. They just quadrupled all the costs and so on. But it made it more participatory. People started fighting for the future of Ethereum instead of doing their own thing.

[24:41] Bob Summerwill: Well, I mean even now you've got that fight happening again. On the Bitcoin side you've got a bunch of small blockers led by Luke Dashjr who want to sort of censor non-monetary stuff off the chain. It's like stop it with your monkey JPEGs, we don't like that. And then it's like, okay, well they have a fork of Bitcoin Core, but it's not independent really because it's downstream. And there's another group saying we want to have a Bitcoin Core but more conservative. And it's like how much more conservative can you go? But yeah, kind of like the original sin of having a single code base is just kind of almost insurmountable maybe.

[25:40] Kieren James-Lubin: I mean none of the hard forks have really sustained. But you can fork it. I mean, I don't know. You can fork it. I feel like quantum — I don't know how split the community would be, but I could see quantum causing a real sustained hard fork.

[25:58] Bob Summerwill: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean one of the hardest pieces there is if quantum does break the encryption, what do you do with Satoshi's coins? Do you let them get stolen? And then that's like a million Bitcoin supply shocking the world. Do you fork to burn them? But then that's like, is that theft? Maybe you do. Are you altering the hard cap then? You've tied those up. Is the sacred 21 million breached now?

[26:47] Kieren James-Lubin: Bitcoin people wouldn't like this at all, but I think you could just try them all and let the market decide. The market has sort of said that — what's Bitcoin Cash at? There's like five of them, right. That at some point were kind of big. And I think they've largely faded.

[27:04] Bob Summerwill: Bitcoin Cash, surprising market cap still.

[27:07] Kieren James-Lubin: What's it — do you know offhand?

[27:10] Bob Summerwill: No, I don't know offhand, but hundreds of millions.

[27:14] Kieren James-Lubin: Hundreds of millions. Okay.

[27:15] Bob Summerwill: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, interestingly, they are doing a bunch of technical stuff. Like they are moving the protocol forward. They have hard forks every six months.

[27:29] Kieren James-Lubin: It is — yeah. It's rare when the new, the fringe supplants the original. But it happens. We got the United States, right? Like, yeah, it happens once in a while. So interesting.

STRATO in 2026 and enterprise blockchain

[27:45] Bob Summerwill: Yeah, yeah. Things move along. So I mean, 11 years in, STRATO, same name, but what's STRATO as of 2026?

[27:57] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah, good question. So we've done many different things. We not on purpose for the first six, seven years were very enterprise exclusively. We just found demand there from — especially as initially a lot of demand was from corporates and individuals felt more diffuse.

[28:23] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[28:24] Kieren James-Lubin: Kind of vague. And also like there was maybe some — in the fullness of time have realized that when you see a bunch of insane people with strong beliefs, you should kind of actually think about leaning into that direction. But the experience I had was like, whoa, you've got something insane. I kind of agree in principle with all, but you people are crazy. Let me go over here and work with these businesses who have ROI calculations and all that sort of thing. The crazy people were both right and wrong at different times.

But yeah, so kind of always the goal — initially when we launched, we intended to be like at that time Chain.com. They also spoke at the O'Reilly conference. Was said that they were the API for Bitcoin kind of thing we wanted to make. And I could see also why obviously there are still some of these around, but you see why it didn't really work for Bitcoin.

[29:30] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[29:31] Kieren James-Lubin: It's like there's not that much you can do with it except — and so on. They ended up pivoting in an enterprise direction too, right. But for Ethereum, it was supposed to be a developer platform. When you launched, they didn't have the RPC providers that you have today. And the thing I was surprised by — if you were starting from scratch you wouldn't do the RPC the way they did. And so we just made an API and hardcore crypto devs hated that it was a normal REST API and corporates were like oh great, I can send Postman to it like I'm used to and yada yada. Your enterprise integration dev is really comfortable with that sort of thing. Corporates are just sending often files around or REST requests in a good case.

[30:25] Bob Summerwill: I mean I think as far as I know that JSON-RPC pattern I think was just copied from Bitcoin.

[30:30] Kieren James-Lubin: Just copied from Bitcoin and I don't —

[30:32] Bob Summerwill: Know how that happened.

[30:33] Kieren James-Lubin: I think it was just that Satoshi also never really designed a web API. That's right. It was just yeah, you had to use the Internet sometimes so it wasn't going to be anything lower level.

[30:50] Bob Summerwill: But yeah, well the fact that the original Bitcoin code only worked on Windows.

[30:54] Kieren James-Lubin: Only on Windows, yeah, it was like you had to build it in Visual C or something.

[30:59] Bob Summerwill: It's a real oddity.

[31:02] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah, it's got to be like an academic or something who couldn't really — who's a genius but couldn't quite code the way that anyone would actually code.

[31:12] Bob Summerwill: No. Well there was certainly plenty of amateurism on the Ethereum side as well.

[31:16] Kieren James-Lubin: Tons, tons. Yeah.

[31:18] Bob Summerwill: Science project gone live.

[31:20] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah. But yeah, so worked for the corporates, individuals, consortia, different industries. But again the goal was just to — could see the tech is good, see it's not being exposed to the masses in the easiest way. This has been maybe the continual thread throughout the company. And yeah, met with different reception at different times.

So I think the pandemic kind of killed the corporate blockchain era. Although it's coming back in a different form now. But it's much more — yes, financial exclusive. It was financial heavy.

[32:05] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[32:06] Kieren James-Lubin: But not financial exclusive at the outset. And now it feels pretty financial exclusive or even corporates doing financial use cases like cross-border settlement and stablecoins or something. But that's actually probably a good thing. They're just using it for day-to-day stuff.

But we had a lot of really complicated — like here's a supply chain with all these actors and you've got what we now know as an NFT tracking some goods that are moving around and different data is attached to it at different points and there's complex privacy rules. This one can see this. It was hard to implement stuff.

You also just actually need the token. You need something that encourages people to have — you see there's a lot of Canton hate out there for good reason, but at least they were like, we're doing a token, we got a bunch of corporates, we get a token and it's a pretty high market cap right now.

[33:06] Bob Summerwill: Yeah. I mean, I think, I don't —

[33:08] Kieren James-Lubin: Know how they got them all comfortable. They were — corporates were very not token comfortable.

[33:11] Bob Summerwill: No.

[33:12] Kieren James-Lubin: Before.

[33:13] Bob Summerwill: No. Well, I mean this was a problem. If you look at something like Corda or Fabric. It's like, okay, so you've got sort of a distributed database of some kind, so you can track data and things, but you haven't got the token that lets you close the loop on the finances of that.

[33:33] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah.

[33:34] Bob Summerwill: So how do payments work in your system?

[33:39] Kieren James-Lubin: They did funny stuff like World Wire. Do you remember this? Right? This is like IBM Stellar collab.

[33:45] Bob Summerwill: Yes.

[33:46] Kieren James-Lubin: Where they had the money leg on —

[33:47] Bob Summerwill: Right, it's right. We'll try and blockchain on Fabric and the pair together will make a whole.

[33:54] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah. But yeah, I mean we didn't have tokens for a long time either, but kind of, I guess because the customers didn't want anything to do with them.

[34:04] Bob Summerwill: No, I mean there's a lot of uncertainty.

[34:07] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah, for sure. Still is. But it's been around for a while, so somewhat accepted. So yeah. So I found — I think the pandemic, we went from like we're getting ready to stand up bigger consortia on this and that. But innovation IT budgeting just all went into, okay, we must shift our operations to remote for a while. Unless you're a lab scientist, with plenty of companies that had — and yeah, it just — they — not that you want that innovation budget either. You want line-of-business budget, but they just weren't ready for it at the time.

So we kind of, in a sense we had done some of the first NFTs in a corporate context. And so we kind of followed that thread with real-world assets, NFTs and so things like whiskey barrels and carbon offsets and the like. So we had sort of an NFT-ish trading marketplace for these things, but then found the demand for ever more liquidity and speed and so on. So we've gone very —

[35:17] Bob Summerwill: Fungibility.

[35:18] Kieren James-Lubin: Fungibility, yes. Fungibility doesn't always create liquidity, but it certainly helps. So we've gone very DeFi of late but still with the heavy real-world asset theme. So a little bit of a winding journey but just trying to get the people to use the thing and the people to be kind of normal. This is like in some ways it was early on the enterprise side and, well yeah, we got lots of customers in those days but sort of maybe mis-targeted. Like some decades ago your first customers were big businesses who had lots of cash and IT departments but they've become so risk-averse and burned by tech vendors so many times that now they're pretty late adopters and you got to find some other segment.

[36:12] Bob Summerwill: Yeah, and I guess they don't like experiments.

[36:20] Kieren James-Lubin: They don't like experiments.

[36:21] Bob Summerwill: They plan to throw them away.

[36:23] Kieren James-Lubin: They also, yeah, it's just — it's more like a lot of times even the value is totally proven.

[36:29] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[36:29] Kieren James-Lubin: It's just hard to migrate and to transition. With any political situation, parts of the corporation fight back because they may find, oh, that's my job there. You buy this technology, a little fiefdom.

[36:49] Bob Summerwill: Certain fiefdom does not like it.

[36:51] Kieren James-Lubin: And so it's magnified when you have to have corporates work together.

[36:57] Bob Summerwill: Multi-corporate.

[36:58] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah, multi-corporate. So we realized we just sort of had to — the network and the communication means had to be open enough and just there for any of the — even for corporates — for this to happen. I don't think — I think you'll have a couple successful pretty much closed networks but largely not.

[37:21] Bob Summerwill: I can't remember which company it was that famously got the cartoon of the org chart of all of them pointing guns at each other.

[37:29] Kieren James-Lubin: That was like the Oracle one, right? Yeah, or — yeah, Oracle. Maybe it was — no, that was Microsoft maybe. And Oracle was like there's Larry and it's like here's the engineers and the legal department was like this one.

[37:44] Bob Summerwill: License enforcement. So yeah, so 2026 is when it all comes together.

Memecoins, RWAs, and why tokenize

[37:51] Kieren James-Lubin: So it seems. Yeah, the world feels ready enough also. Okay. Yeah, weird years of late. NFTs came and went. I think they'll kind of come back some, the rhyme. We'll see. We kind of got them back in the form of memes. So a general trend to more liquidity. But the memes, while still cool, felt base case more nihilistic.

I also think actually you should just make trading assets out of lots of things. I actually think this is a good thing for humanity. Like if, for instance, we work tangentially with some folks who are in the merchant cash advance business. So if you're a pizza shop, right, the oven breaks, you might have good cash flow, but you need to get that thing turned back on today, right now. And you don't really care what the interest rate is. So some of these guys, they're like 50%, 60% interest rates, they pay it back couple weeks, it's okay. But the banks abandoned to some degree a lot of small business lending. Big guys won't do it. And so you could imagine if the pizza shop had a meme coin.

[39:07] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[39:08] Kieren James-Lubin: There might be some brand equity, it could liquidate or you could even lend against it. And so actually I think memes are good if it's a — it's mostly a duration thing. Maybe you need to have lockups or something. The pump.fun — the average lifespan of a meme coin, like 90 seconds or something.

[39:39] Bob Summerwill: Millions a day.

[39:40] Kieren James-Lubin: Exactly. Millions a day. But tokens are great. This is the thing. It's just not all of them are good, but I think there should be more tokens. This is going to work well and be designed properly.

[39:56] Bob Summerwill: Remember Token Summit way, way back?

[39:59] Kieren James-Lubin: I don't know if I went to this one. Where was it?

[40:02] Bob Summerwill: Well, there was one that William Mougayar organized, which I think was 2018, but I don't think that was the first. I think there was one in the previous year. I don't know who would have organized.

[40:15] Kieren James-Lubin: Okay, this is an interesting point. So first wave ICOs, right. I think on a dollars in, dollars out basis, probably pretty good returns, like venture or better, I'm guessing. Yeah, like Binance, you had — so seems good. But yeah, you have to approach it like a portfolio, right? Yeah. You don't want to make super concentrated bets in tokens, it seems.

[40:41] Bob Summerwill: Well, I mean, I remember at the start of the EEA it was really hard to get people engaged because it's like, do you take the easy money of doing work for some shitty ICO.

[40:56] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah.

[40:56] Bob Summerwill: Or do you do an enterprise engagement.

[40:59] Kieren James-Lubin: Yes. Do some brutal corporate business process mapping, audio, YOLO on a — integrate with the LDAP and all of that. Yeah. The turnaround time on token markets — obviously it's going to be cyclical and we'll probably get interest rates to go down again. And we'll have a new and different token boom potentially after that. But no, tokens are good. People like them, sometimes they go up, often they go down.

[41:49] Bob Summerwill: That's the way of the finances.

[41:50] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah.

[41:52] Bob Summerwill: So yeah. Do you want to say anything forward looking about the project and what we're doing right now and what's coming up?

Tokenized metals, lending, and crypto cards

[42:01] Kieren James-Lubin: So we — I guess closing the loop on what we currently do. Big emphasis on tokenized precious metals. Gold and silver. That's where a lot of the — although certainly not all of our deposits are. And we help make assets like those hard assets generally — I guess we've got Bitcoin and ETH on the system, various yielding stablecoins, regular stablecoins. We make them productive basically through lending. So if you have a bunch of gold, you go drop it off at the vault or mail it in. They'll do a check on how much. If you've got a couple ounces, call it 10 ounces of it. You get 10 tokens and you can then use those tokens in a DeFi-native manner. So swapping in and out, borrowing and so on.

So kind of our goals are just to increase the — the system functions quite well for the scale it's at. We just kind of need to grow it. So more deposits, different types, more of our native stablecoin in circulation, more types of collateral-eligible assets. So for instance they're getting to be a lot of stocks on chain now. So it's not like we tokenize these ourselves but we'll take X stocks like the broad market index stock, the S&P 500. You can deposit that and get credit against it too.

But I think in our more NFT-ish real-world asset days we sort of struggled with — and I mean found good answers to — the question like why do you tokenize something? I like the world where, going back to the Ethereum white paper, all property rights of some kind are managed on chain in a composable and transferable manner and so on. But why bother? And the answer is often like well there's something you want to sell or there's something you want — usually you want to get greater liquidity out of something. But you could sell it, maybe you could fractionalize it and maybe you could borrow against it. And borrow, I think, is the biggest one, if we're being honest. That's the thing that will make the legacy assets move on chain.

[44:28] Bob Summerwill: And cards, credit cards. How does that fit into the — oh yeah.

[44:32] Kieren James-Lubin: So we support the MetaMask card and we'll add more. So it's been awesome that I think maybe it was Gnosis Pay first for a while. And I still have the frustration that if you're at a dinner with a bunch of crypto people, probably you will split the bill with Venmo. Can't stand it. USDC, ETH. Give me something.

It's a pain — you might not have a wallet on the phone and so on, perhaps for good reasons. Or you could have a little small balance wallet on the phone. But it's also you're copy-pasting addresses and all that. And the restaurant itself will not take crypto.

So the awesome thing about the non-custodial cards is basically you send them stables, I suppose they take some risk there. They are extending you a little bit of credit for a short period of time. When the charge comes in they kind of grab your stables and do the US dollar — which means the merchant doesn't need to change anything about their — they don't need to accept crypto at point of sale and you do not need to have a bank account.

Moreover, we and others have tied this into lending so you could have a portfolio.

[46:10] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[46:10] Kieren James-Lubin: Borrow stables against that portfolio and then when you top up the cards, you're paying some modest interest rate against your portfolio. So you've really got a credit card that's really cheap. Granted, over-collateralized. It's not like you're waiting for the money to come in per se. You have to do it against the money that's already there. Yeah, but it goes from 26%, 34% to like 2%, 4%, 5%. It's much better than a credit card, a classic credit card. So really these are debit cards.

So I hope we see proliferation of the non-custodial crypto cards. They seem here to stay.

[46:54] Bob Summerwill: Yeah.

UX, insurance, and mainstream adoption

[46:55] Kieren James-Lubin: And so yeah, then you'll be able to just spend at point of sale and you don't have much bank tie-in. And yeah, but I think long run there's a whole lot to do, there's a whole lot more. But we want to see just individuals — I think crypto is less gray than before, but still something like Uber has to happen. And it's happened in spots where the thing's just better. The individual's lives are immeasurably improved and yeah, it's gray but their lives are better. And so if you took it away, the voters would be really upset.

[47:42] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[47:42] Kieren James-Lubin: And crypto is mixed on that. There's just been too many hacks and exit scams and all that sort of thing, I think.

[47:50] Bob Summerwill: Tolerate dreadful UX, for example.

[47:53] Kieren James-Lubin: Dreadful UX, yeah.

[47:55] Bob Summerwill: But that doesn't scale. Not many people will tolerate terrible UX.

[48:02] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah, only the true believers or the speculators or what have you. So I think we'll see — this crossover is clearly happening as we speak, but it just needs to get easily integrated into day-to-day life. And there's a couple things. We need some sort of insurance solutions. Probably the insurance should be largely off-chain or significantly off-chain, right. Or at least not on the same protocol that needs the insurance, if you will. Because you don't want the insurance to get drained at the same time as the protocol, right.

And I think it's too expensive right now. DeFi users want yield. Often the yield is equivalent to the cost of paying the insurance. Untenable. You could insure some subset. Maybe we need some kind of unsecured lending. The engine of it used to be very much like this — about the United States and the 1870 to 1910 or thereabouts. And they called them wildcat banks. The banks would just go bust sometimes and just keep all the deposits. But it was an unbelievable period of productivity. Now we've got big banks and the number of banks is falling.

[49:37] Bob Summerwill: Yes.

Tokenized equity and accredited investors

[49:37] Kieren James-Lubin: So it's strange a little bit that we have a venture capital asset class. In theory, some really high risk things need to be done by equity instead of debt.

[49:51] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[49:51] Kieren James-Lubin: But in theory, the banks could have done that themselves. But I guess probably for regulatory reasons, what we instead got was a bunch of specialist kind of banks, not quite banks.

[50:04] Bob Summerwill: Yes.

[50:04] Kieren James-Lubin: That fund projects on an equity basis and so on. I bet there's a whole lot there. It's actually — and tokens do a good thing in that they make the access to that pretty permissionless. And I think a lot of the — despite pretty good returns, I think on a dollar in, dollar out basis from the ICO era, there's still an adverse selection where if a project, in many cases, if it's not a well-considered crypto project, that they are trying to raise in a token vehicle is a bad thing.

[50:45] Bob Summerwill: Right, right.

[50:46] Kieren James-Lubin: But hopefully that'll change. If you got — why — okay, why didn't Anthropic do a token? There isn't really a role for a token necessarily and it's not a utility function for it. Exactly. But I also just think it would be fine if the token really was sort of the same thing as Anthropic equity and it was totally open to the public. I think the only reason that doesn't happen is compliance and it's annoying to be accountable to the public.

It's a private company. You got a trillion dollar valuation in a private company now. AI being so unpopular among a lot of the American public and the public can't even get any of the returns associated with these companies. It used to be what, like three years to an IPO? Before Sarbanes-Oxley I guess — before various financial crises greatly increased the compliance burden on being public.

[51:52] Bob Summerwill: Yes.

[51:53] Kieren James-Lubin: Also, I mean there's definitely — most investors prefer bigger things. That's part of it. I have a friend who maybe this was like 6, 12 months ago discussion was just like, 300 million of ARR and it's like yeah, we're not big enough yet. The market's not — you're not big enough. Yeah, it's quite a lot. But it's — everything is not everything but it feels very gatekept by these well-intentioned rules that are meant to protect the investing public.

And of course people will — but I bet we'll see some tokens just go do something cool and really valuable in the real world. I think again going back to Anthropic, if the dollars were the same they probably, I think attitude-wise wouldn't do a token — and assuming that there was no compliance worries — wouldn't do a token because it's a little bit low status. But I think that'll change. Once you get a couple big winners, it's more democratic, if you will.

[53:05] Bob Summerwill: Small D. Yeah, yeah. I mean accredited investor stuff is just kind of dumb.

[53:11] Kieren James-Lubin: It's totally dumb. They later said now you can take a test too. It's not just an income threshold, I believe.

[53:19] Bob Summerwill: Right.

[53:19] Kieren James-Lubin: Believe you can take a test. The new SEC is also just rolling back lots of rules to closer to the free market paradise.

[53:31] Bob Summerwill: That's certainly a real protectionist thing of saying if you've got this amount of capital you're allowed to do it.

[53:39] Kieren James-Lubin: The effect, of course, is to just keep the —

[53:42] Bob Summerwill: And you can have someone that's got deep knowledge of that industry, really good insight into opportunities and risks, and you can't get in.

[53:52] Kieren James-Lubin: Yeah. And in crypto, they largely can.

[53:55] Bob Summerwill: You can and may go good or bad.

[53:59] Kieren James-Lubin: May go good or bad, indeed.

Closing

[54:01] Bob Summerwill: All right, well, thanks so much.

[54:04] Kieren James-Lubin: Thank you.

[54:04] Bob Summerwill: All the best. Okay. It's kind of longer than I thought, but that's fine.

[54:08] Kieren James-Lubin: Well, I figured we'd make clips.

[54:10] Bob Summerwill: Yeah, absolutely. Yep.

[54:15] Kieren James-Lubin: Right.

[54:16] Bob Summerwill: Yeah. That was nearly an hour.